The "corporate hat" reality: HR's job isn't friendship
Samantha Crisp didn't plan to end up in HR. She started in operations at her first tech company, spent time interviewing candidates, running learning workshops for her team, and eventually a VP noticed she had the instincts for it. One pivot later, she's built a career spanning campus recruitment, L&D, and HR operations. But the most clarifying moment she describes didn't come from a training programme or a certification, it came from a CEO telling her to put on her "corporate hat."
At the time, Sam pushed back internally. She'd entered HR wanting to be the ultimate employee advocate, and that phrase felt like a contradiction of everything that drew her to the field. But she came to see it differently. HR leaders can't be 100% people-first 100% of the time and pretending otherwise doesn't serve employees, it just defers the harder conversations. As Sam puts it, "being an HR leader is really about not just making the employees happy that day, but making sure that they have a job to come back to tomorrow."
That reframe matters. It shifts HR from a role defined by keeping people comfortable to one defined by keeping the business viable enough that those people still have somewhere to show up. Advocacy and business judgment aren't opposites, they're the same job viewed from different time horizons. The HR professional who only ever says yes to employees isn't protecting them. They're just postponing the moment when someone else has to say no, usually with less care and less context than HR would bring to it.
When HR ops becomes visible: the early warning signs of broken systems
HR operations tends to be invisible when it's working. Nobody notices the plumbing until the pipes burst. So what's the first sign something's wrong? According to Samantha Crisp, HR Operations Manager at Trip Stack, it's the moment your source of truth splits into several competing versions. HR has one headcount number. Finance has another. Department heads have a third. Nobody agrees, and reconciling them requires a small army of spreadsheets.
"If you need four spreadsheets and an apology to answer a simple question, then your pipes are clearly bursting and you need to get in better control of your system," Samantha puts it plainly. It's a signal most HR teams recognise but too few act on quickly enough. When basic questions about your own workforce require that much manual effort, the underlying data infrastructure is a liability.
Samantha has lived this more than once. She describes coming into small and mid-sized tech companies and discovering that all employee data was being managed entirely through spreadsheets. The fix sounds straightforward, migrate everything into an HRIS, but the real work happens before a single record moves. Messy, duplicated, or conflicting data needs to be cleaned first. Skipping that step doesn't solve the problem; it just relocates it into a shinier tool.
The reason this matters most during scaling is data integrity. When headcount grows fast, bad data compounds. The companies that invest in cleaning and centralising their employee data early are the ones that can actually answer leadership's questions without an apology attached.
Hiring practices worth cutting (and the ethical line you shouldn't cross)
Reference checks are one of those hiring rituals that feel responsible but rarely deliver. Samantha's take is straightforward: they're mostly a false sense of security. Candidates hand-pick their references, so you're guaranteed a glowing review. You're not uncovering anything you didn't already learn in the interview. If you want a real picture of how someone works, put your energy into deeper behavioral interviews, case studies, and concrete work examples instead.
That said, there's a narrow slice where reference checks do add something. Asking a reference what motivates this person, or how to manage them well, can surface useful context to pass on to their new manager. Samantha acknowledges this, but adds an important caveat: you can get the same information in a first one-on-one with the new hire anyway. So it's useful intel, just not uniquely available through a reference call.
Where this conversation gets sharper is on backdoor reference checks — when a hiring manager quietly reaches out to someone they know at a candidate's current company, without the candidate's knowledge or consent. Samantha is unambiguous: that's unethical. You're basing a hiring decision on one person's subjective, potentially outdated opinion, with no way to account for what the candidate was going through at the time or how they've grown since. She won't act on unsolicited opinions either, and she now addresses it proactively through interview training with hiring teams before it becomes a problem.
The line is clear. Validate facts through background checks. Skip the performative reference calls. And never make consequential decisions about someone's career based on a conversation they didn't know was happening.
Backdoor reference checks and why senior leaders need coaching
Most people know what a reference check is. Fewer talk openly about its shadier cousin: the backdoor reference check. That's when a hiring manager bypasses the candidate's chosen references entirely and reaches out to someone they happen to know at the candidate's current or former company — without consent, without context, and often without the candidate knowing it's happening.
Samantha is clear on where she stands: it's unethical. The problem isn't just the lack of consent. It's that the hiring decision ends up resting on one person's subjective opinion, shaped by whatever was happening in that working relationship at a specific point in time. People change. Circumstances change. A difficult period at one company doesn't define someone's entire career, and a backdoor contact has no obligation to give a fair or current picture.
What makes this particularly thorny is who tends to do it. In Samantha's experience, it's almost always senior leaders — people with wide networks who see a quick call to a mutual contact as due diligence rather than a boundary violation. Her fix isn't to wait for it to happen and then deal with the fallout. She addresses it head-on during interview training with hiring teams from the start, so the expectation is set before anyone gets the chance to go rogue. When it does come up, she coaches the leader directly and explains why the practice is unfair to the candidate.
The underlying principle is straightforward: hiring decisions should be based on what you can actually observe and verify — behavioral interviews, work examples, structured assessments, not on unsolicited opinions filtered through someone else's memory.
Onboarding for global teams: "ways of working" and product training
When you're onboarding people across multiple countries, the temptation is to build separate playbooks for every region. Samantha Crisp takes a different approach. In her first week at Trip Stack, every new hire goes through a live "ways of working" training — delivered in person where possible, virtually for everyone else, that establishes shared principles around communication, collaboration, and feedback. The goal is a culture anyone can step into, regardless of where they're based. No 20-version rulebook. One set of norms, applied consistently.
The session covers the company's culture code, key policies, and practical guidance on working with distributed teams. By running it live rather than dropping a PDF in someone's inbox, Samantha creates space for real conversation, not just information transfer. And she doesn't assume the first version is the final version, onboarding feedback surveys run alongside the programme to surface what's missing and where the experience can improve.
The other piece she's added at her current company is product training. It sounds obvious, but most onboarding skips it entirely. In a complex tech business, someone joining in a non-client-facing role can spend months without really understanding what the company does or how their work connects to everyone else's. Product training closes that gap. As Samantha puts it, it helps you see "how it all just kind of like trickles down like a domino effect", how your output affects the person next to you, and the team after that. For new hires who don't want to ask what feels like a basic question, that context is genuinely useful from day one.
High performance without burnout: expectations, feedback, and practice
The myth that high-performing teams are built from wall-to-wall Type A overachievers is one Samantha pushes back on firmly. In her experience, the people with stronger work-life boundaries, the ones tech culture might dismissively label "Type B", tend to be the more consistent performers. They don't burn out, they don't disappear on leave, and they don't quit mid-sprint. The real driver of performance isn't intensity; it's clarity. As she puts it, anyone can succeed "as long as they know what success and winning looks like in their role."
A mixed team with clear expectations consistently outperforms a homogenous team running on fumes. The goal isn't to slow the ambitious people down, it's to stop treating chronic overwork as a proxy for impact.
The same logic applies to how companies develop their managers. One-off workshops don't change behaviour. Samantha learned this firsthand through a monthly programme called "Iron Sharpens Iron", small groups working through real-world case study scenarios, presenting their approaches, and getting feedback from senior leaders in the room. The value wasn't just the content; it was the repetition, the peer learning, and the ability to fail safely before facing those situations for real.
When it comes to the core skills worth training, she keeps it practical: effective one-on-ones and feedback. For giving feedback, she uses the SBI framework , situation, behaviour, impact, because it keeps the conversation grounded in observable facts rather than personal judgement. For receiving feedback, she teaches COA: clarity, ownership, action. Understand it, own it if it's valid, then commit to doing something different. Two frameworks, consistently practised, that actually move the needle.
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